UC San Diego

Across four chapters, we answer four empirical questions and, in theorizing about each, we explore the relationships between moral or romantic evaluations of others and perceptions of others’ desires and values. In Chapter 1, we ask whether the side-effect effect—an asymmetry in intention attribution—is a function of moral judgment, as leading hypotheses maintain. We test the predictions of an alternative moral-free hypothesis that attributes the effect to the asymmetric involvement of costly and beneficial side-effects, and people’s tendency to treat foreseen costs as sacrifices. We successfully produce the effect in cases that are morally neutral and successfully mute the effect in cases that are morally charged. In Chapter 2, we ask whether and to what extent the base rate of a behavior influences associated moral judgment. We find that base rates influence moral judgment with only very small effect sizes. Additional studies suggest that previous research purporting to find more substantial effects of base-rate information on moral judgment may have failed to properly isolate base rates from injunctive norms. We reconcile our findings with the more general but well-established impacts of social-influence by showing that the influence of others’ behavior depends on whether we consider them part of a morally relevant reference group. In Chapter 3, we examine the factors underlying a blaming discrepancy between responses to a cyber peeper and to a peeping Tom; a discrepancy for which current theories of blame do not provide a straightforward explanation. We focus on major differences between cyber peeping and peeping Tom scenarios that may contribute to a blaming discrepancy, such as the effort involved on the part of the peeper and the risk-taking on the part of the victim. Four of eight such factors are found to account for most of the discrepancy. In Chapter 4, we use a new method to ask men and women to self-report the traits they prefer in a romantic partner and to indicate what they imagine the opposite gender prefers. The results reveal striking discrepancies between what people report wanting in a potential partner and what the opposite gender imagines they want.